17Dec 08

The last time “This Ole House” came up, a commenter on ILM quite rightly pointed out what I somehow hadn’t twigged – that it’s a song about dying. Of all songs on that theme, it’s surely one of the most stoical in its way – a joyful “whatever” in the teeth of advancing decrepitude. Liveliness was about all Shakin’ Stevens had going for him, but goodness he worked it.

Shaky sidesteps new wave and new pop and reaches back to the rock’n’roll revival that played such a part in the mid-70s’ charts. That had a cabaret tinge and so does he, but there’s an energy in his pastiche that – at this stage anyway – keeps it bearable. His other great advantage over fellow revivalists was knowing how to present that energy on video – on the clip for “This Ole House” he’s in perpetual motion and as the song cuts from room to room to roof it’s like Shaky’s dancing with the house itself.

Re: the Shaky/punk crossover, I remember seeing a TV clip from the late 70s with Danny Baker where he spoke of trying to organise some kind of meeting-of-the-tribes gig between the punks and the rockabilly/rock-n-roll revivalists and Shakin’ Stevens name was mooted. Having only been familiar with Shaky as an exponent of fluffy, friendly, music for six-year olds, the idea of him once having a kind of credibility seemed extraordinary

Mind you, the thought of Danny Baker having some kind of credibility also seems quite wierd :-) I say that as a fan of him, but he does seem a long way removed from that era now.

“Sprightly” and “bouncy” are two words used upthread, and they sum this up nicely. A great one for jumping around to at student discos when you’re none too self-conscious (see also “Antmusic”) and a lot of fun. So is the vid of Shaky dancing around the ole house in question, even if the backing singers get a bit cheesy.

As I mentioned yonks ago (and got spoiler-bunnied for it) in I can’t remember which thread, Shaky and the Sunsets actually predated the rock’n’roll revival of the 70s and went back as far as the time Sha Na Na were playing Woodstock. I’d forgotten before looking it up just now that he was also in the West End production of “Elvis” in the late 70s. With that kind of dues-paying, he deserved his time among the biggest pop stars in the country, and if he did become showbiz, he was entitled to. Bit of an ornery old bugger though, by all accounts.

Actually for a 4 (or similar from most commentators) this record has generated a lot of positive comment – I guess partly that stems from the fact that Shaky had paid his dues and was a credible artist with a genuine belief in what he was doing.

Meanwhile, Roxy Music’s one and only appearance on Popular has generated a considerably less positive response on the whole. Who’d have thunk it?

Wretched dross with a tired old rock ‘n’ roller, polluting the airwaves with his sound and the TV with his faded denim.
This makes Captain Sensible’s “Happy talk” seem classy in comparison but the saddest thing of all is there was much worse to come from Shaky.

Someone (I forget who) on Australian TV recently told a poignant anecdote about SS, about SSs manager trying to sneak out a gig attended by 20 people at the fag end of his career by crawling along the floor only for SS to bust him and ask what he was doing…

I just felt sad what becomes of our heroes…poor SS, although he was no Adam Ant, deserved better!

As a closet New Romantic at the time I could not believe this was No 1. It was by far the worst record in the charts so how could it top the pile over classics like Reward, Einstein A Go Go and Planet Earth ?
I saw Shaky as a big threat (quite rightly as it turned out) to my hopes for the future charts being dominated by moody melodramatic synth-pop He was the bubble-burster on a par with General Galtieri a year later who destroyed my political hopes for the SDP.

I never forgave Shaky for this. He was the bad fairy of the 80s marring many an otherwise classic line up on TOTP with his stupid dancing like a middle-aged embarassing uncle turning up at his neice’s birthday party.

Of course at this distance I can appreciate that he was a very professional and hard-working entertainer who appealed to an entirely different pre-teen demographic from the rest of the charts. His records achieved high positions because he had no real competition for so long; they came through the middle when sales to teens were split between so many other artists.

When SAW came along and targeted the younger kids with Kylie and Jason he was finished and really he was the lesser of two evils.

That comment about twenty people attending a gig – bollocks. Shaky’s live shows have never faultered despite chart placing declining during the end of the 1080s. He still had a very strong fan base – and still does to this day, he still packs out Theatres, and continues to tour across Europe. Oh and from 1979 untill 1992, his manager was a woman, not a man. Well, if he’s still got it in him after all these years (He is sixty three now) then who is to argue? Especially if people are sitll willing to see him, Shaky is very good live. (For the record Marie Marie is a belter and in my opinion better than This Ole House, TOH still being a very good rnr record, it was a bit too “novelty” compared to the crisp production of Marie Marie) All in all, Shaky is and was a good entertainer, a good performer and was the biggest selling singles artist of the 1980s. :)

#28 and 31 – ‘Hot Dog’ and ‘Marie Marie’ were both Top 30 hits in 1980 but there was another single between those two and ‘This Ole House’ – the airplay-only hit ‘Shooting Gallery.’ I remember that one but not ‘Hey Mae’ which came out in the spring of 1980, after ‘Hot Dog.’ Wiki states that ‘Hey Mae’ got to 83 and ‘Shooting Gallery’ 79, although I thought the published Top 100 only appeared for the first time in 1983?

Re-reading this thread on the back of TOTP ’81 on BBC4, I note Mike’s reminiscence at #26. Shaky visits a girls’ boarding school dorm after lights-out to make sure they’re all tucked up … on Jim’ll Fix It?! Might have seemed OK when Mike posted that comment in 2008 but you shudder now.

Popular

I'm writing about every UK number one single, in order. It's taken a while, it'll take a while longer. Wander around in the archives, or join in with the marvellous bunch of commenters we've managed to attract - new voices always very welcome!

CHARLES AND EDDIE – “Would I Lie To You?” 21 Oct 2011 Classicist pop often sacrifices quality for vibe. Shakin' Stevens might have had the moves down but if "Oh Julie" had fallen back through time to the 50s it would have…

BLUR – “Country House” 5 Jul 2013 BOXING? A “heavyweight battle”, the NME cover-billed it. And if “Country House” vs Oasis’ “Roll With It” was a title bout, the music press were desperate to play Frank Warren.…

THE TAMPERER featuring MAYA – “Feel It” 14 May 2014 An Italian chop-shop job, lashing together riffs and a bassline from The Jacksons’ bombastic “Can You Feel It?”, verses from an obscure club track (“Drop A House” by Urban Discharge),…

LIVIN’ JOY – “Dreamer” 23 Jun 2013 A dance music confession: I never, quite, intuitively grasped what counted as House and what fell under Garage. The bumping, cut-up rhythms and vocals that begin the remixed “Dreamer” feel…

BABY D – “Let Me Be Your Fantasy” 28 Apr 2013 After a run of mostly charmless number ones, it's easy to rate this record: its vigour; its momentum; its status as a memento of good times people were having not…

ENGLANDNEWORDER – “World In Motion” 29 Dec 2010 "World In Motion" is the ultimate 1990 record, but oddly the specific World Cup it reminds me of is 2002: living in London, broadly optimistic about England's prospects, watching football…

About the Author

Featured Posts

22 Jan 2009
This is a graph – done by anatol_merklich off the Poptimists LiveJournal community, so massive thanks to him – showing the number of new entries in the UK singles chart for each year from 1952 to the present.

8 Aug 2008
On one level the ‘plot’ of “Dreadlock Holiday” is hugely important to any judgement of it. On another, not at all, but let’s recap anyway. The narrator is a tourist in Jamaica – he gets mugged for his silver chain and returns to the comfort of his hotel where a woman tries to sell him […]

3 Sep 2007
Mars Planets: the atomisation of the Mars Bar. An entropic dis-integration, the tendency of all things to become more chaotic, in confectionery form. I’m trying to resist the impulse to tie this stuff up to no-such-thing-as-Society atomisation because that’s not how we do things, right? And Mars Planets are better to share than a proper big […]

12 Mar 2010
People in the Popular comments boxes are talking about “the canon”. I’m always quite curious as to which bits of the canon have ‘taken’ with a broadly pop-positive audience such as we have here. So here’s a poll, very easy to fill in, just say which of the Top 50 albums OF ALL TIME EVER […]

13 Feb 2000
England is DIFFERENT (or SPECIAL if you want to be polite) to everywhere else for many reasons, but one is because our music “industry” (it’s not an industry – making baked beans is an industry, and nobody does THAT in their spare time, writes fanzines about it or has them poured over themselves at weddings. […]

21 Dec 2009
Well, that’s that: the machine has been given a good beating and we can look forward to “Bulls On Parade” on the festive Argos ad next year. I will admit I didn’t think the RATM crew could do it: I was wrong. But as the dust settles on this most fractious and increasingly entertaining Christmas […]

23 Apr 2000
My first encounter with the exotic was on the Magic Mill at Thorpe Park, a South-East England theme park which from appearances had originally been based around a cramped zoo or city-farm set-up. At some point in the late 70s it had seemingly panicked, though, and parked itself up in order to survive. With its […]

20 Jun 2005
Last week saw the release of not one, but two films about previous films. And I don’t mean Batman Begins (which should be retitled Batman Starts for Essex). Inside Deep Throat, a documentary about the making of and the effect of notorious porn film Deep Throat. And Baadasssss!, Mario Van Peebles film about the making […]